Thursday, 20 March 2014

The creative process in photography.

There is generally a confusion in our
minds between technique and creative process. Although the two are linked they
are not one and the same thing.

It's particularly important to
address this issue in photography, where all too often this confusion reigns
supreme. One only has to look at the great majority of uninspiring (and often
remarkably similar) alt-process genre images to realise that technique in
itself adds little to the realisation of creativity. Similarly in my own genre
of landscape photography the predominance of the F64 Group attitude still
reigns supreme, as if getting everything in focus says something in itself. It
does not. It says you have mastered a technique, but that is a long way from
mastering the creative process.

It may be legitimate for the
individual to pursue the mastery of technique so that it doesn't detract from
the expression of his or her ideas, but it is equally legitimate to utilise
technique in a more questioning frame of mind, where it becomes linked with the
creative process itself.

Although the act of photographing
something is itself transformative, in Gary Winogrand's words “To see what
something looks like as a photograph” I find this a limiting perspective and a
narrowing of the possibilities of the photographic medium. There are vastly
greater possibilities for creative expression than that. It's little wonder the
misunderstanding that everything has been photographed is repeated so often.

Are we really so limited in our expressive
possibilities, as thinking, feeling, analytical human beings, to simply limit
ourselves to photographing something to see what it looks like photographed? Or
can we take ideas and run with them, pursue them through our complex,
individual minds and find new ways of saying things or new things to be said?
If we can’t then photography as an art form is dead, but I see plenty of
evidence to the contrary on a regular basis.

Equally there are misunderstandings
around conceptual art and conceptual photography. More often than not I hear
people talking about conceptual modes of artistic expression in dismissive
terms. There is ’good’ and ’bad’ conceptual art as much as there is ’good’ and
’bad’ art in any other form of expression. The truth being that ’concept’ is
only one stage of the creative process. Starting and finishing with an idea is
never a good thing, it's too simplistic for the viewer to engage with, or maybe
too simplistic a perception on behalf of the viewer if they fail to see below
the surface of an idea. To get beyond that stage we need to consider what the
creative process is, how it enables us to reach deeper, to intuit more and
realise better.

In simple terms the creative process
is the application of a concept to the chosen medium. But this is just the
beginning of the possibilities of creative process.

Creative process if expressed in
purely analytical terms (that feel somewhat alienating to the artist) can
be reduced to perception, conception and expression. Perception - being the
information gathering stage; conception - the idea or what is to be said; and
expression - how it is to be said.

The creative process is also cyclical
as an expression is made, new ideas are formed, new information gathered and it
feeds back into the process once more. Ideas, expressions, solutions and the
reassessment of information becomes resolved once more. They maybe dismissed,
pursued or forgotten, but it's all happening!

In this way it's possible for the
artist to follow previously unseen routes that come from a much longer, deeper
internalisation of the concept. This is probably why to the outsider work can
look difficult or opaque, or, in more positive terms, mysterious. For the
artist it is a journey that does as much to open their “doors of perception” as
it does for the viewer.

It may not feel like this is what
we’re doing, assuming we are in fact doing any of it. But this is essentially
what the creative process is about. To take the, very personal, example of my
Mametz Wood series, the realization of the initial idea came about over a
period of years and from a wide variety of sources. The more immediate starting
point came from a very simple and unfocused (metaphorically and
photographically!) exploration of some interesting old sessile oak woodland. I
had some very vague ideas to do with a sort of abstract expressionist landscape
photography that honestly got junked fairly quickly. I made some very
unsatisfying images during the few days I could spare there, but they set me
thinking. It wasn't until days or perhaps weeks later that I started to form
connections with the images I'd made for a previous series I'd worked on,
Skirrid Hill, taking inspiration from the poems of Owen Sheers and in
particular Sheers’ poem called Mametz Wood.

They were personally satisfying
images - more evocation and allusion than description and the process of going
out and finding metaphors for the poems on Skirrid Hill itself was even more
satisfying. In truth I'd been searching for several years for a way to return
to that process, I just hadn't found the right subject. Being a messy human
being I initially skipped the research stage and concentrated on the technique
for expression. Did I mention that the stages of perception, conception and
expression don't necessarily happen in that order?

I'd recently completed a series,
Songs of Travel, using multiple exposures to explore our movement through the
landscape, so it wasn't a great leap to consider a more simplified double
exposure. Still it took me a while to realize that what I wanted to introduce
through double exposure wasn't simply ambiguity, but that each layer had to
have a meaning in itself as well as working with the other layer. I suppose
it's taking the idea of layers of meaning a bit literally! But it did open my
“doors of perception” it is one case where technique took me to places that I
would otherwise have had difficulty imagining. But the techniques alone would
have been meaningless without the ideas to back them up and the creatively
virtuous circle of their pursuit.

So I'd worked out the perception and
conception stages before doing a great deal of research. I wouldn't advocate
this approach, but it was a busy time for me, so things happened rather
haphazardly. When I finally did some research on the battle of Mametz Wood I
came across David Jones’s poem In Parenthesis and began to find titles for my
images that were in part explanatory and in part gave them context and I hope
greater depth and resonance for the viewer. That had a virtuous effect on the
progression of the images, the insights I sought and my own understanding of
the ideas I want to express.

None of this happened quickly, in
fact, if I exclude that earlier work on Skirrid Hill, it still took me about
three to four months. Time to allow the stages of the creative process to
intermingle, suffuse or gestate is vitally important.

It is for these reasons that I
advocate working on at least some form of series or project. We need to focus
on that ’thing’ we want to say, allow it to gestate within us, the pursuit of
it enables us to better understand it and the expression of it feeds back yet
more ideas and understandings. In reality that probably feels extremely vague,
it takes a great deal of time to come to fruition - at least for me it does.
And if we’re working in new territory to our previous work then grasping that
’truth’ is never a simple process.